


two strangers who share the same memories

by murdershewrote



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Dimension Travel, Female Tony Stark, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Parallel Universes, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 21:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10999485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murdershewrote/pseuds/murdershewrote
Summary: Tony would really like the ghost of her father to leave her the fuck alone.Tony would really like this alternate universe version of himself to not fuck up as badly as he did.They meet in a cave.





	two strangers who share the same memories

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Luna Emerson: “We are not friends, nor are we enemies. Rather, two strangers who share the same memories.”
> 
> Warnings for: being held captive in a cave, offscreen rape/sexual assault, torture, waterboarding, PTSD, murder, misogyny

She’s alone in the cave.

Raza doesn’t tell her he’ll let her go if she helps him. Raza doesn’t really tell her anything. Raza introduces himself with a hand on his chest (and later, again, with a hand on _her_ chest), points and names her Stark, and gives her a sheet of paper with an image of the Jericho missile. It isn’t hard to figure out what he wants.

Tony doesn’t bother keeping quiet. She screams, she begs, she bargains, she insults and threatens. The cave is silent as a grave but Tony isn’t dead yet. Tony argues with herself, discussing options and narrating her movements. Judging by the way they haven’t reacted to her insults, the terrorists don’t speak English any more than she speaks Arabic or Pashto or whatever the hell they are speaking.

 

They hurt her in the beginning, to make sure she understands the consequences of not complying. She’s never left alone at night, but they don’t bother with waterboarding or branding again, not until she kills one of them. The waterboarding is not so bad. At least she feels cleaner afterwards.

Her period comes, thank god. It also keeps the men away from her for a few days. The cramps are just as bad as she remembers but she pushes through because who knows when she’ll get another few days uninterrupted and she needs to synthesize the arc reactor and give it time to cool. She swears she sees another pair of hands helping her, but there is no help in this place and she’s probably just feverish.

The arc reactor is installed and building things is easier when she doesn’t have to carry around a car battery. She’s just dismantling things at this point, to hide the arc reactor and make them think she is complying.

 

She’s hallucinating again. “Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m not Howard,” says the hallucination that looks a hell of a lot like the way her old man must have looked in his younger years.

“Don’t care. Fuck off.”

 

“Normally I need illegal substances to see shit like this, but it turns out isolation and torture can also reproduce some of the effects of a high.”

“At least this way you don’t have to resort to huffing gasoline out of the welding tank.”

“Point.”

Tony has decided to ignore the implications of the hallucination and just enjoy actually talking to someone. It’s probably just the subconscious project of her loneliness, although she doesn’t know why the hell her mind would dream up a younger version of her dad when she needs someone to talk to. It’s not like they talked that much when he was alive.

 

Raza isn’t pleased with her progress.

“Waterboarding was the worst. I got hydrophobia. Refused to shower for almost a whole year. Passed out from dehydration a couple of times until Pepper suggested an opaque cup and a straw, which helped.”

“I don’t mind the dry-drowning. At least it washes off bodily fluids.”

The hallucination winces and looks away, because everyone knows what happens to women. 

"You’re me, right? Male-me. Alternate universe Tony Stark. Was Howard any nicer to you ‘cuz you were a boy? He always got pissed he didn’t have an heir. Good thing he died otherwise I never would have gotten control of SI.”

“I don’t know if he was nicer comparatively, but he was still a pretty shitty father. No time, better things to do, saw me as an extension of himself, blah blah blah.”

“Universal constant, I suppose. Howard Stark is a shitty father.”

“Tony Stark ends up in a cave in Afghanistan.”

“Is that where I am? I wasn’t sure if we’d crossed over into Pakistan or not.”

“Pretty sure. I was definitely in Afghanistan when I got picked up, so the border can’t be far.”

“So escape is possible.”

“We’re Starks, sister, nothing is impossible.”

 

“Do you spell your name with a y or an i? You are still Tony, right?”

Tony is currently drifting in a pain-fueled fugue state, so it takes her a while to answer.

“With a Y. Antonia Marie Stark. Mom wanted to name me Natasha. I started calling myself Tony ‘cuz I thought it might make Howard like me more.”

“I don’t think there is anything we could have done to make Howard like us more.”

Tony huffs out a laugh and gets back to work.

 

It’s now or never. The suit is as good as it’s ever going to get and the longer she waits the more chance of being discovered. On other-Tony’s advice, the schematics are burned. She hooks the radio on. Other-Tony had been found by Rhodey but Tony isn’t holding onto the hope that the military is still wasting money looking for a woman.

Other-Tony appears and kisses her forehead. They both know he won’t exist outside the cave.

“It will work, little sister. You’ll _make_ it work.

“You are Tony Fucking Stark and there is nothing you can’t do.”

 

Tony wakes up in the desert with two sets of memories. She understands now what other-Tony had meant when he told her to make her own mistakes, to not repeat his. At the time, she’d asked how the hell she was supposed to do that if he didn’t tell her about his mistakes. But now she has them, him, all in technicolor.

 

Rhodey finds her ~~again~~. The ~~same~~ helicopter picks her up. They send her a ~~different~~ doctor, a woman. Tony doesn’t allow herself to be examined, hiding the arc reactor under tape and her injuries under bravado. She isn’t in imminent danger of dying and that’s all the military needs to know.

She makes them take her to Mass General in Boston, instead of New York or Malibu. Tony refuses to see anyone, telling Pepper to make a statement to the press and Rhodey to keep the military off her back. She’s vulnerable right now and fewer people who see her the better.

It’s not the same doctor as it was twenty years ago, but the drugs and the procedures are the same. She declines the DNA test again, because identifying the person was never the problem. Tony tells the nurse she killed him, blew him up and burned him alive. The other woman just nods and tells her, _good_.

A familiar hospital was not Boston’s only draw. She slips out to visit the chemical engineering center at MIT. The professor was a classmate of Tony’s and is very accommodating of her requests. Tony had stayed away from chemical engineering because of the proximity to chemical weapons, but that’s really too bad because poison is beautiful.

Tony makes a point to never be anything but extremely polite when speaking to people working in the service industry and she takes care of her employees. Layla from the night cleaning crew replaces a bottle of scotch in one of the top-floor offices without asking any questions.

Obadiah Stane dies of a stroke six days after Tony gets back from Afghanistan. Tony is still in the hospital and regrettably unable to attend the funeral.

One problem down, a million to go.

 

Carting around a second lifetime full of memories and trauma is a pain in the ass. Tony can’t go back to the Malibu house that she loves because she is now extremely aware of how isolated and vulnerable it is. Knowing about Stane is worth losing the house though.

After that, though? Most of the memories aren’t even _helpful_.

What the fuck is she even supposed to do with this knowledge? Captain America, aliens, Shield, Hydra, the Sokovia Accords—what the fuck is she supposed to do? Is her priority to prepare the world for an alien attack? Is it to create a framework for superhuman accountability? Is it to lead Stark Industries? Is it to destroy Hydra? Is it to hunt down terrorists?

 

Maybe it is none of those things. _Fratello_ told her to live a life less fucked up than his. He told her not to make his mistakes but as far as Tony can tell all the bad things in his life came as a result of trying to save the world and be a better man.

Maybe Tony isn’t supposed to use the knowledge to save the world. Maybe Tony is supposed to save herself, instead.

Maybe, instead of being a hero, she’ll be _happy_.

 

Maybe she’ll save the world. Maybe she’ll condemn it to a fate worse than the one in _fratello’s_ memories. Maybe she’ll do nothing.

Tony has ten years of foreknowledge in her head, an arc reactor in her chest, hatred in her heart, steel in her spine, a fortune in her vaults, a technological empire at her fingertips, and the world in the palm of her hand.

There is nothing Tony cannot do.

 

Whatever happens, regardless of _fratello’s_ memories, will be on her. Tony is nothing if not original. She’ll make her own mistakes, fuck up in new and interesting ways.

One thing she is definitely not going to do is be put in a coma by Captain America and killed in a hospital bed, unable to defend herself from invading aliens.

There is a whole new timeline in front of her, filled with infinite possibility. Combinations and permutations, so many differences, big and small, will all add up until she has changed things so drastically that her borrowed memories will no longer be applicable and she will have created something entirely new.

Tony is looking forward to it.

**Author's Note:**

> This probably would be easier to follow if I spelled it Toni or used Natasha, but I couldn’t do it. Tony Stark will always be Tony Stark. I’ve been messing around with this ‘verse for a while, but at least I finally got something up. We’ll see if it continues. 
> 
> Please point out any grammar/spelling errors and let me know if I need to warn for anything else.
> 
> Blanket permission for transformative works and collections. 
> 
> I'm on [tumblr.](http://murdersshewrote.tumblr.com)


End file.
